GoDaddy Online Stores Get a Mobile Checkout Upgrade

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New mobile payment options and features help small businesses complete the sale by enabling faster online orders.

GoDaddy is greasing the wheels on the virtual shopping carts for small businesses using the company's ecommerce platform, Online Store.

The web and ecommerce services provider has added Apple Pay support to Online Store, allowing shoppers to speed up the checkout process and helping businesses rack up more sales. As Greg Goldfarb, vice president of Commerce and Email Marketing at GoDaddy explained, Apple Pay does much more than tick a box for small business shop owners.

"We're enabling our customers' customers to have an easier time" completing an online sale on iOS devices, he told Small Business Computing. "Just tap to pay. We're focusing on how to make the mobile experience really seamless."

Making mobile transactions frictionless not only makes the shopping experience a brisk and effortless one – after all, nobody wants to incessantly poke around an iPhone screen to make a purchase – it helps entrepreneurs establish a reputation as easy to work with, thereby raising customer satisfaction rates.

"If we delight our customers' customers, our customers will be happy," Goldfarb said. That's the logic behind the addition of Apple Pay and an array of new features aimed at getting small businesses up to speed in the mobile payments revolution.

Mobile Commerce on the Rise

Ecommerce, in fact much of the web itself, is rapidly leaving its desktop PC roots in the past. The scales have unquestionably tipped in favor of mobile, suggests GoDaddy's analysis of internet shopping trends.

Sixty percent of the all the traffic on websites and online stores powered by GoDaddy comes from iPhones, Android smartphones and other mobile devices. Early customers who had Apple Pay enabled on their stores in late October have reported a whopping increase of nearly 78 percent in checkout conversion rates.

The surge in mobile commerce was felt well beyond the GoDaddy ecosystem is this holiday season.

By the end of this year's Black Friday (including Thanksgiving Day), online shoppers in the U.S. spent $5.27 billion, a 17.7 percent year-over-year increase, according to Adobe. More than $3.3 billion was spent on Black Friday alone, a new record. Of that, $1.2 billion of which came from mobile devices, a 33 percent jump compared to last year.

The report uncovered another interesting statistic. In online shopping transactions, the average order value – essentially the total of each successful checkout – was the highest on iPhones ($142) compared to smartphones powered by Android ($130).

Likely due to all the travel associated with the holiday, 57 percent of online store visits and 40 percent of sales, a tidy $771 million, were generated using mobile devices on Thanksgiving Day. Folks were also more likely to complete a sale on smartphones (27 percent) than on tablets (13 percent), Adobe found.

Speedy Mobile Checkouts and Abandoned Cart Reunions

In addition to Apple Pay, GoDaddy has streamlined the mobile checkout process, allowing shoppers to complete their purchases faster and with a lot less frustration and hunting-and-pecking using on-screen keyboards. "We completely redesigned the checkout form, reducing data entry from a mobile device," Goldfarb said.

For example, the zip code field is placed more prominently. Once completed, the system automatically fills out the remaining fields (city, state, etc.), drastically cutting the time it takes to enter an address.

Another new feature helps shop owners reunite shoppers with their abandoned carts. Abandoned Cart Recovery is a new section in the GoDaddy ecommerce dashboard that generates a list of abandoned carts along with their status.

While it provides some much-needed visibility, the feature also offers store owners an "interesting way to reengage their customers" with targeted emails and reminders, for instance. So far, technology has led to "meaningful increases" in completed purchases, Goldfarb reported.

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